In 1975, Muennig built a 16-foot-diameter glass teepee on his land as a temporary home. The exposed, greenhouse-like structure, now used as a studio, was designed to study the effectiveness of passive solar heating and living in minimal space. But if you’ve ever been to Big Sur, you know time often slows to a barely perceptible crawl, and Muennig found himself living in this glass teepee for another 18 years before he finished work on the bigger house.

A pair of unusual positrons

This picture, taken in the Fermilab 15-foot bubble chamber filled with a mixture of neon and hydrogen (Why Ne and H? Click here), and exposed to a high energy neutrino beam, is part of an electromagnetic shower produced in a neutrino interaction. In this picture, the neutrino beam, which produces no bubbles, comes in from the left.

The lone Compton electron near the middle of the picture shows that negative particles turn to the right.

The first highlighted track, which passes close to this Compton electron, is a positron from an e−e+ pair. It comes to a sudden end near the fiducial mark. At this point the positron has annihilated in flight with an electron, producing a pair of photons, gamma γ. One of these 'materialises’ in the field of a nucleus, producing an e−e+ pair, about 11 cm (in the actual bubble chamber) from the annihilation point.

The second highlighted positron also comes from an e−e+ pair, but this one does not annihilate. Instead, the track - mysteriously, mid-flight - starts curving in the opposite direction, as if it had suddenly become negatively charged. What has happened is that the e+ has run head-on into an electron e−, transferring all its momentum to that electron e−. This can only happen if the mass of the positron e+ is equal to that of the electron e−. (The positron e+ that stops would eventually have annihilated, but there is no evidence of the resulting photons γ in this picture.)

This is a good picture to show that quantum phenomena are statistical in nature.

Pablo Cesar Amaringo (1938 – 16 November 2009) was an acclaimed Peruvian artist, renowned for his intricate, colourful depictions of his visions from drinking the entheogenic plant brew ayahuasca.[1] He was first brought to the West's attention by Dennis McKenna and Luis Eduardo Luna, who met Pablo in Pucallpa while traveling during work on an ethnobotanical project. Pablo worked as a vegetalista, a shaman in the mestizo tradition of healing, for many years; up to his death, he painted, helped run the Usko-Ayar school of painting, and supervised ayahuasca retreats.
Amaringo was born the seventh of thirteen children in 1943[????] in Puerto Libertad, a small settlement on the banks of a tributary of the Ucayali River. When Amaringo was a boy, his family were reduced to extreme poverty after some years of relative prosperity. As a result, they moved to Pucallpa where Amaringo attended school for just two years before he was forced to find work to help support the family. When he was 17 Amaringo became extremely ill, nearly dying from severe heart problems. For over two years he could not work. He believes he was eventually cured due to a local healer.
It was while recovering from this illness that he started to draw and paint for the first time. Amaringo began making drawings with pencil and shading with soot from lamps. From a friend employed in a car factory he got permatex, a blue substance with which he coloured the drawings. He had no money for paper so he used cardboard boxes. Sometimes he took a little lipstick and other cosmetics from his sisters. Later he used ink, watercolours and then a friend gave him six tubes of oil paint.

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Soon Amaringo began to make money from portraits, but lost his market when photographers began to colour black-and-white prints. With the discovery of his new artistic talent Amaringo's career as a healer also received exposure. For seven years, 1970–76, he travelled extensively in the region acting as a traditional healer.
When Luna and McKenna met Amaringo in 1985 he was living in poverty, barely surviving by teaching English to young people from his home and selling the odd painting to passing tourists. Luna suggested he paint some of his visions, a project which became the basis of a co-authored book, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (North Atlantic Books 1999).[2][3]
Amaringo occasionally gave interviews in the years following the book's publication, and later penned the preface for Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Techniques for Healing the Soul (Destiny Books 2006). He also appeared in The Shaman & Ayahuasca: Journeys to Sacred Realms (2010), Michael Wiese's documentary film about ayahuasca.
After a protracted illness, Amaringo died on 16 November 2009.

In 1986, the painter Pierre Soulages was commissioned to create a series of stained glass windows for the Romanesque abbey church in Conques, to replace the windows installed in the 1940s.

The stained glass windows were installed in 1994, after eight years of research. Wishing to place this work within the logic of his artistic development without thereby making the windows a mere extension of his painting, he decided not to make any preparatory drawings before having determined his material or rather having been determined by it. This material was a colourless glass whose translucency could be modulated. This glass did not yet exist, but he had it made for the occasion.

Intended for the abbey’s 104 openings, Soulages’ windows are made up of large bands of untinted glass. These bands have gradations of variable opacity present in their very thickness. Thanks to the material, translucent and not transparent, the openings give the appearance of surfaces which are their own source of light.

Saw Killing Them Softly (aka Cogan's Trade aka Andrew Dominik's follow up to The Assassination of Jesse James...) the other day, kind of a drag. Weird pacing, talk and talk and more talk, so much talk... not that's it's a bad film really, just so surprisingly small-time and modest compared to Jesse James, and lacking in execution. Basically, the film is about the "collapse" of a New Orleans local crime/gambling ring as metaphor of the 2008 financial crisis, with its mob hitman as regulator sent to clean up the mess, discussions in parked cars that sounds like boardrooms meetings etc. All this happening while speeches from the 08 presidential campaign regularly play in the background, the whole thing feels really heavy handed and gets tired pretty fast. That leaves nice visuals,a cool soundtrack, a couple of great lines :/

I felt exactly the same way watching Killing Them Softly, and I did the exact same thing and watched Jesse James the next day. Kind of sad that it wasn't better.

I also didn't like Django Unchained as much as Tarantino's other movies, I guess I was expecting more ridiculous spaghetti western but I got more rap music video. There was also no real awesome dialogue scene aside from the mediocre dinner scene. I was expecting intro to Inglorious Basterds or the pub scene, but it never came. DiCaprio and Waltz were amazing, still feel iffy about Fox. WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME